


The Demolitionists

by Mab (Mab_Browne)



Category: BioShock, Sapphire and Steel
Genre: Community: spook_me, Crossover, Dark, Gen, Spoilers, Spook Me Multi-Fandom Halloween Ficathon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-26
Updated: 2014-10-26
Packaged: 2018-02-22 18:22:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2517389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mab_Browne/pseuds/Mab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How much collateral damage is acceptable?</p><p>Crossover between Sapphire and Steel and Bioshock 2.  Bioshock fans will probably be displeased with me by the end of this story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Demolitionists

**Author's Note:**

  * For [magician](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magician/gifts).



> This story is for Magician, with many thanks for all sorts of things, but in particular her donation to Moonridge in 2012.
> 
> My son checked my Bioshock facts. Anything wrong is due to the deadline creeping down my neck rather than his inattention.
> 
> I chose cyborg as my Spook Me monster because I planned to write my S&S story as a Bioshock crossover, but that's pretty tangential to the story as a whole.

“You implied something neoplastic in nature,” Eleanor says. Sapphire’s wrist is still encircled in her hand. She can feel the bones grind, but the woman stays preternaturally calm. She’s as blonde, as beautiful, as poised as Mother. Transference, Eleanor thinks, with only a small tinge of shame. “Aren’t I hurting you?”

“Yes,” Sapphire says, but not at all as if it matters.

~*~  
Delta needs to be someplace else, but first the little girl beside him must be safe. All the little sisters need to be safe and now that she’s told him Eleanor’s message she should go back. She pauses instead, her hands and face pressed to the tempered glass window that looks out on the water, wonder the second light shining from her inhuman, glowing eyes.

“Look, Daddy,” she says. “There’s a mermaid. A beautiful, beautiful mermaid.”

Delta turns his head to look out the glass. He ignores, or tries to ignore, the monstrous reflection of his own image, and looks out beyond. He expects to see a splicer, a man or woman as changed or monstrous as he is. He expects to see something misshapen that swims with a shark’s vicious hunger, and it’s only the vestiges of instinct honed into him that makes him look. The little sisters can’t recognise peril. They are as conditioned to see only beauty and peace as the Daddies are to protect them from Rapture’s dangers and so he looks, just to be sure.

An astonished noise rumbles out of him, and the little sister exclaims, “Oh, Mr Bubbles, you sing so pretty!” Her tiny hand pats his leg in its armoured suit. “Pretty songs and pretty mermaids.”

Rapture is sunk deep enough below the ocean that the only light is the pallid glow cast out and filtered through Rapture’s windows. Without that illumination, even Delta’s augmented body wouldn’t be able to see with whatever light might struggle its way from the surface.

But if light ever shone here… there is a woman outside swimming the depths, seemingly human, and Delta knows enough that the seemingly human cannot survive as she does. If the light was bright, her hair would flow darkly blonde in the sea currents, the draperies of her clothes would float a clear mid-toned blue, her skin would be as pale and pinked as if she was breathing a bracing surface wind. But there isn’t the light to show these things and so she is all blurred tones of grey and cyanotic blue. She comes a few feet closer to the window, and smiles at the child and blows her a kiss. “Ohhhhh,” the little sister sighs, ecstatic at this marvel.

The almost maternal look fades as the woman looks at Delta. For him there’s a nod of reserved respect before she turns and half walks, half swims (it’s all dance, with the water her yielding partner) towards the complex the other side of the seabed. She is no observable threat, but she unnerves Delta; he looks away and scoops the little sister up to sit her upon his shoulder. “Whee!” she shrills, nestling against his helmet until they reach the vent. “Oh Mr Bubbles,” she calls, as she crawls out of sight to safety. “Today was such a good day.”

He’s glad for her, but there are no good days until he reaches his own little sister, his bonded child, his Eleanor.

~*~  
Eleanor stands, and paces back and forth before she lunges down to the other woman, her index finger an accusation. “Who are you to play god?” she demands.

“We don’t claim to be gods,” Sapphire says tranquilly. “I’ll grant you that there are times when it’s been expedient to suggest it, but we’re not gods. No. Not gods.” She has lowered her head, but then lifts it again. “Surgeons. Surgeons are a far better analogy.”

“Oh, I know all about surgeons,” Eleanor says bitterly.

~*~  
“Might I trouble you to step back a little?” says a voice behind her, and Brigid shrieks in surprise.

“I do beg your pardon, I didn’t mean to startle you, but then it’s rather unavoidable when you aren’t expecting someone, isn’t?

She clutches her fist against her chest, trying to ease her thumping heart into peace. “Who are you?” she demands.

“Well, I go by Silver when I’m out and about, but that won’t tell you very much, I’m afraid.”

“How did you get here?”

“How does anyone get here?” he says evasively. His pale grey suit is immaculate, as is the fall of his bright red hair. The few Rapture inhabitants who give a damn about these things could never achieve this man’s bandbox dandy perfection. Brigid eases herself towards her work counter – there will be something there that she can throw, or stab with.

“Oh, really, don’t worry, I’m quite harmless. I just need to make a few adjustments here.”

“Adjustments?” Brigid asks sharply.

“Adjustments. To put things right, you know.” His long, lined face seems made to express melancholy. “There is rather a lot to put right, after all.”

“What do you mean?” Brigid asks. She stutters slightly, too much old guilt ambushing her tongue.

“Structurally speaking,” the man, Silver, says. “It’s not all about structure, there has to be flow as well, but I’ve always found structure to be more my milieu.”

He puts his hands on her shoulders and moves her inexorably to a point about three feet from one wall. He radiates cold – it’s like standing in front of an open freezer. “Excellent,” he says, and walks past her to place his hands on the wall behind her. She turns in place and watches as the wall writhes like a shaken out sheet under his touch.

“What… what are you doing?” Her voice grows shrill with panic. Who is this? What does he want? She has visions of them crushed by all the great press of water around them, and she puts out her hand to pull him away, only to drop back with a cry. Silver ignores her, while the wall ends its unnatural movement and becomes still and smooth again.

Silver turns to her, gentle and amused, and pats her face as if she’s one of the little girls that haunt Rapture and her conscience in equal measure. She’s too startled even to flinch. Instead she freezes, cold with shock, expecting his hand to be the touch of frozen gas. Instead, it’s merely humanly cold, the way her hands so often are now. The volcanic vents below Rapture offer unending power, but Rapture is too broken to harness that power everywhere that it ought.

“I’m quite useless at explanations at the human level, I’m afraid. It’s all rather technical, and you’re an excellent scientist but our fields are quite different.” He looks at her, he looks all the way through her, as if he can see her past sins at her back. “But I do promise you that it’s all to put things right.”

“You promise?” she asks, scornful of herself as much as of him, because a small, foolish part of her would like to believe that some things could be put right. A few of them. Please.

“Oh yes,” he says with airy assurance. “It’s what it’s all about, at its best. We do hope for the best.” The cold sinks into her core then, because she understands that so far as Silver’s concerned she is a child, one who needs to hear a comforting lie. She opens her mouth in protest before she blinks, and then blinks again, because he’s not there anymore. She wheels, wildly, giddily taking in the room around her. She runs to the door and looks down the hallway. There’s no sign of him, and she runs back to explore the line of wall that he touched, first with her fingertips and then her palms. It’s a wall, no more, no less. Everything about it is normal, just like the sound of her little ones that she can hear from the adjacent room.

~*~

“But you’ve already described time as a corridor,” Eleanor cries. So why can’t it branch? Why are we the ones without right to existence?”

“If it was that simple we wouldn’t be needed!” Sapphire declares passionately. “A simple branch is no matter, or multiple conduits that forever run parallel. But everything is tangled, everything tips from one catalyst to another, all the possibilities are always present, and it’s dangerous!” She moves, her hands out as if to hold Eleanor; without a touch and only the briefest mental impulse Eleanor sends Sapphire flying through the air. The impact with wall and floor is a series of noisy, awkward thuds.

“I will be free, and my father will be free, and you are not going to stop me!” Eleanor cries, and is gone, stepping sideways with an entirely different technique to the one that Sapphire practices.

Sapphire leans up on an elbow, wincing because some things always hurt. Her mouth doesn’t hurt, but her hand presses there anyway - a pensive human gesture for a human form. “We wouldn’t dream of it,” Sapphire says, and sighs.

~*~

Once this was a ballroom, and the rotten remains of heavy draperies still droop from their moorings at the ceiling, where they haven’t fallen to puddle mustily on the floor. At one end there are broad stairs leading to an upper level. In better days, the rich and the beautiful paraded down to dance. Powerful men used the stairs as their podium to declare the glory of the city of Rapture. Lead has walked down those stairs in his turn, part of the trail he’s marking through the city. The cynical might more likely call it a detonating cord. 

The little sister has wandered unexpectedly far ahead of her protector, and Lead waits at the bottom of the broad stairs, well out of the way. He can’t resist a greeting though.

“Good day to you, little lady,” he says.

“Hello,” she says. Her childish face is unsure, and Lead smiles his sweetest smile and watches as her expression clears. “My Daddy is taking me to see the angels.”

“He’s a very good daddy then.”

“He’s the best,” she says.

“And here he comes,” Lead says, and watches as her ‘daddy’ lumbers across the ballroom. He sees Lead and a noise, the wail of a deep sea creature, emanates from him. Lead steps back, keeping his distance, and briefly lowers his head in a gesture of submission. “Sir. I don’t plan to get in your way.”

The Daddy pauses for a moment. He may be faceless, his expression hidden behind the diving suit that someone here grafted on him and into him, but his attitude is quite clear. Lead has shown proper respect and may now be ignored. The child and the daddy proceed up the grand staircase and Lead walks the way they came, crossing the open space of the ballroom to find an exit and a hallway. When he turns the corner, he nearly curses because there are two splicers who are probably in pursuit of the child and who have instead found him. They’re both men. One has long, knife like talons sprouting from his hand, the other stands square and blocky beyond the human norm, great cords and ripples of muscle banding and misshaping him.

The one with talons springs and Lead sees little choice. He steps sideways. The void-like cold tells him of his mistake, and he emerges thirty feet down the hall – the same hall, but the wrong hall. He has jumped time continuum as well as space. It’s like taking a step in atmosphere and finding yourself leaping as if you were jumping on Earth’s airless moon. Wrong, impossible, and that’s why they’ve come to Rapture.

He knows this hall – the signs of his past journey are all around him and he must not change them. There are no splicers. What is here is the Daddy, plodding on but pausing at the sight of Lead and assuming that he must be a splicer. Behind him, a crumpled, tiny shape is discarded on the floor. In this place where Lead should not be, the Daddy has killed the child for the drugs contained in her body. Modified vocal chords can only produce a cetacean roar. Weapons deploy, and Lead doesn’t have many choices left – none at all if he guesses his next move wrong.

Hastily, he retraces his sidestep (the ease of it is nearly as heart-stopping as the cold. Absolutely anything could pass through here) and emerges in the hallway, the right hallway. The splicers are gone and he pauses a moment, trying to process the fear and regain the calm he needs to be sure of his work. He reminds himself that just because the daddy protects the children here that it doesn’t make this continuum any more right or safe than the other.

The public areas of this complex end, and Lead makes his way down increasingly dilapidated, rusting service stairs until there comes a point where he has to stop and prepare himself to swim in the dark and the cold. When his body is ready, he journeys down until he lays his hands on this structure’s stony foundation, feeling for the currents of liquid rock far beneath; he knows Rapture and all its history from top to bottom. Exhausted, he struggles his way upwards again. He doesn’t trust himself to sidestep. At the third level of the service stairs, Silver is waiting for him.

“Mother sent me,” he says.

Lead isn’t too tired to laugh. “Do you hope that he’s listening, or hope that he’s not?”

“Either will do perfectly well.” Silver extends one hand and loops it around Lead’s wrist. Lead sighs with relief at the confirmation of anchorage. “He was rather worried when you got lost. One might almost assume that Steel likes you better than he does me.”

Lead grins. “I wonder why.”

“It’s a mystery,” Silver says. His face becomes sombre. “I don’t know how long your little excursion took at your end, but you were gone rather a long time at this one.”

Lead isn’t surprised. “Long enough for you to worry as well?”

“Good co-workers are hard to find,” Silver says archly. “Two of us should be enough weight that you won’t be blown like thistledown into inappropriate places.”

“I think this must be the first time I’ve ever been compared to thistledown.”

“A first time for everything,” Silver declares, and guides them along the short route to comparative safety.

~*~

Sapphire sits huddled against the wall long enough that Steel comes to find her.

“Are you all right?”

“You know exactly how all right I am.” He crouches beside her, not touching her, simply waiting. “I remind Eleanor too much of her mother.”

“Did you succeed?” When she doesn’t answer, his voice hardens. “Sapphire, did you succeed?”

“Yes, yes, it worked. Eleanor has been obliging enough to initiate physical contact each time it’s been required.”

Steel is obliging enough to touch her first, the stern comfort of a hand in hers, his strength used to pull her to her feet.

“Why us, Steel?” She can’t help asking a question that she knows the unanswerable answer to.

For one uncontrolled moment his face is as haunted as her voice. “Why not us? If this has to be done, then why not us? We have the skills.” He firms his own voice into a tone of professional comfort. “Nobody will suffer.”

“Eleanor might. The three times we’ve had to do this… she’s asked more and more pertinent questions. She perceives quite differently to most humans.”

“Then we’ll hope that she blames her mother rather than you,” Steel snaps, and Sapphire blinks, before she gently speaks his name, direct to his mind. She sees him steady. “Lead was delayed, and I haven’t had the chance to obtain the last few minor triggers. Meeting Sofia is unavoidable, and I’m not as socially adept with humans as you are.” His voice is wry, and falsely light.

“Ah well,” Sapphire says, equally wry and false. “Sofia would be impervious to your charm at your best, so it won’t matter.” They have never let go of each other’s hand, until now. Steel’s grip tightens in a brief gesture of comfort, and then he’s gone to carry out the final preparatory task.

~*~

When Sofia hears a noise in her living quarters she does not hesitate. She takes up a pistol and with precise stealth she opens the door and sights her weapon at the stranger and fires. She knows that she hits him because of the whine of the ricochet when the bullet flies away and buries itself in the interior partition.

He turns to glance briefly at her, before he resumes his rifling of her private files. The door of the metal cabinet is warped and broken where he forced the lock, with his bare hands she presumes given the lack of tools and the ineffectiveness of her gun. There is only a slight, beautifully dressed man with floppy blond hair. He’s shorter than Sofia.

“Who provided you with the plasmids you’re using? Did they explain your ultimate fate to you?”

He pauses, before speaking to his hands as they work and sort. “Luckily I don’t have to rely on your shoddy and exploitative gene technology.”

That stings, but it also intrigues. However broken Rapture might be, it is the womb of wonders that Sofia, through her daughter, will present to the world when the time is right. Sometimes, those of small intellect and vision have been horrified, but never has she met someone dismissive of what has been achieved here.

“Shoddy?” she asks with brittle ice restraint.

His hands are filled with envelopes, her history, and she has to control the stirring of fury. How dare he? How dare he?

“That would be the implication that disturbs you, wouldn’t it? You don’t doubt, do you, Sofia Lamb?”

“Doubt is for children and the weak,” she tells him

His eyes are coldly glacial blue. “Doubt is the price we pay. And if you haven’t paid it, be very sure that someone else has.”

“Whatever my daughter has told you-“ she begins. This man must be Eleanor’s ally, someone more capable than that pathetic monster that Sofia must, must separate from her daughter.

“Eleanor is no concern of mine,” he says brusquely, and that is almost as shocking as his violation of her home. He’s gone, leaving only the broken cabinet and the scatter of documentation that wasn’t important enough to steal. Sofia’s hand is sweaty around her gun, a regrettable but understandable manifestation of stress. She hurries forward to look through her files. There is no pattern that she can see to what he’s taken – some tape reels, the correspondence between her and Andrew Ryan before she ever came to Rapture.

She stands straight, and orders her thoughts, and goes to see her daughter.

~*~

When humans play with small explosives, there is sometimes a warning. ‘Light blue touch paper and retire.’

Something as graceful as retirement won’t be possible. It will be more a desperate leap to the last piece of high ground in the face of an oncoming wave, and all of them are nervous as they build their gestalt for the final act.

“Ready?” Steel asks. No-one can hide in the gestalt, and Sapphire feels his shamed temptation to let himself be carried on the backwash, to be gone with everything else. She murmurs briefly and he apologises for his weakness and then bolsters the courage of an anxious Silver in his turn.

Sapphire has her own temptations. She sees Eleanor, is Eleanor, finally breathing surface air, making her farewell to her dying father, enjoying her bittersweet triumph, until the building sense of dread becomes overwhelming. Something is wrong, something terrible is about to happen, and Sapphire whispers Steel’s assurance as Eleanor grabs one of her little sisters in a rough hug.

“They won’t suffer,” she promises.

Eleanor reels as all the threads combine. Her father is dead, gone in peace. His essence and knowledge is within Eleanor instead. Sofia is dead by Eleanor’s hand. Sofia lives by Eleanor’s hand. Eleanor will bring glory. She will bring terror.

She will bring nothing, as all the threads unravel into nothingness, and Sapphire nearly follows her, except for Lead’s strength behind her, for Silver’s bright technique, for Steel’s sharp anchor.

They wrench aside to safety, to a restored continuum where Rapture and its sprawling hydra timeline never was.

“Idiot,” Steel says in her mind, but he understands. The rebuke is pro forma, almost kind.

The human body can’t help but weep.

**Author's Note:**

> So this story came partly out of my fascination with the themes and aesthetic of Bioshock 2 - one day I might even actually play it. My kids will laugh at me. Magician asked for a Sapphire and Steel story for one of the Moonridge stories I owe her and I wondered how the temporal agents of the S&S universe would regard the sprawling options and multi-timelines of the average video game. Not happily, I suspected, and this dark little piece about what the protagonists hope is necessity came out of that speculation.


End file.
